em, on each other. Even our most delicate and seemingly
harmless songsters, like the nightingale, feed entirely on living
creatures--each one of which, however small, has cost God as much
pains--if I may so speak in all reverence--to make as the nightingale
itself; and thus, from the top to the bottom of creation, is one chain of
destruction, and pain, and death.

What is the meaning of it all? Ought it to be so, or ought it not? Is
it God's will and law, or is it not? That is a solemn question; and one
which has tried many a thoughtful, and tender, and virtuous soul ere now,
both Christian and heathen; and has driven them to find strange answers
to it, which have been, often enough, not according to Scripture, or to
the Catholic Faith.

Some used to say, in old times; and they may say again--This world, so
full of pain and death, is a very ill-made world. We will not believe
that it was made by the good God. It must have been made by some evil
being, or at least by some stupid and clumsy being--the Demiurgus, they
called him--or the world-maker--some inferior God, whom the good God
would conquer and depose, and so do away with pain, and misery, and
death. A pardonable mistake: but, as we are bound to believe, a mistake
nevertheless.

Others, again, good Christians and good men likewise, have invented
another answer to the mystery--like that which Milton gives in his
'Paradise Lost.' They have said--Before Adam fell there was no pain or
death in the world. It was only after Adam's fall that the animals began
to destroy and devour each other. Ever since then there has been a curse
on the earth, and this is one of the fruits thereof.

Now I say distinctly, as I have said elsewhere, that we are not bound to
believe this or anything like it. The book of Genesis does not say that
the animals began to devour each other at Adam's fall. It does not even
say that the ground is cursed for man's sake now, much less the animals.
For we read in Genesis ix. 21--"And the Lord said, I will not any more
curse the ground for man's sake." Neither do the Psalmists and Prophets
give the least hint of any such doctrine. Surely, if we found it
anywhere, we should find it in this very 104th Psalm, and somewhere near
the very verse which I have taken for my text. But this Psalm gives no
hint of it. So far from saying that God has cursed His own works, or
looks on them as cursed: it says--"The Lord shall rejoice in His works."